This is a very well-written piece about what I see as the fatal flaw of modern liberalism: its tendency toward a totalizing project of maximizing the "utility" of humans, as understood by statistical metrics legible to thumos-less bean counters deep within an impenetrable bureaucratic state. The result is a regime in which humans are simply replaceable and interchangeable utility-generating cogs, stripped of their inner lives, and in which soul and spirit are frowned upon. I don't see how in today's society liberalism can be separated from this tendency.
Like, even accepting this characterisation, in what sense is all this "liberalism"? It's just modern society. People want more wealth and to live longer and be happier, and elect governments and construct bureaucracies to make decisions for them that attempt to facilitate that. What even is the alternative vision of society? In what ways would the "high-minded civic republicanism characteristic of the American founding" be any different? Would there no longer be any specialist medical knowledge, so public health bureaucracies wouldn't exist? Would governments and the electorate no longer care about people dying en masse from pandemics, presumably because everyone is so virtuous and fulfilled?
When the theatres of London were closed for 14 months in 1592-3 due to plague, was that the "subterranean core of the liberal project" asserting itself attempting to "remake man"? Or just governments doing what they've always done during epidemics?
The vibe I get is "society would be better if I was dictator and could force everyone do what I want and value what I value". Death of liberalism indeed.
